The Influence of the biobased economy on agricultural markets is a study from two Wageningen UR institutes that shows how the impacts of new technology may have unanticipated effects. The rapidly increasing use of biobased products is expected to green the economy and to create more demand for agricultural commodities, and both are positive for the society as a whole and for the agricultural sector in particular. But the short-term adjustment process means replacing labour employed in the petroleum-based sectors and coping with competition for land-constrained agricultural resources.
These are some of the outcomes of a three-year study for the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality by a team of economists and biobased technology specialists from LEI and Food & Biobased Research, both part of Wageningen UR. The research team had to innovate in their forecast about which commodities within the Dutch and European economy would be most likely to benefit from the input of biobased materials. They used data on the EU-27 level in order to understand the significant market developments that would also have an influence on the Dutch agricultural and manufacturing sectors.
The results demonstrate that it is possible to combine information on technical biobased production processes (in terms of molecules) with economic based production processes (in terms of euros). The next steps will be to have better statistics of biobased production processes and more refined modeling capacity to capture to repercussions throughout the economy and within the demand structure for the required agricultural output and land requirements (both in the Netherlands and abroad).